Flexrake Classic D Handle Digging Fork

Spring is Here: Got Your Spading Fork Warmed Up?

Though she's best known as a speculative fiction author, Canadian Margaret Atwood is also a gardener. In fact, she's the one who said, "In Spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

We gardeners spend winter cleaning our tools, salivating over garden catalogs, and dreaming that the soil is warm enough to begin planting so we can smell like dirt again. One tool I've been sharpening this winter is my Flexrake Spading Fork, the one with classic molded wooden D-handle (stock number CLA106). Spading forks are the tools we use to turn soil in our garden beds in spring and to harvest root vegetables like onions and potatoes come fall. They also come in handy for some emergency aeration. One won't replace a shovel for turning the soil of a new bed, however; nor is one any good for pitching hay and so forth because of that short handle.

Seven Easy Herbs - Mint

Mint, the forever plant

Kitchen gardens filled with herbs delight gardeners of all ages and for many, the joy of simply walking outside to harvest fresh, herbicide-free herbs for a recipe goes beyond satisfying. Herbs introduce children to both gardening and cooking, possibly encouraging them to eat healthier but also to explore their garden. Some herbs are food sources for butterfly caterpillars.  Many tend to attract bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Seven commonly grown herbs reward chefs and gardeners with their ease in growing and their fresh flavors.  

Build a Simple Garden Trellis

A Home-Made Trellis

Pole beans grow on a trellis made of EMT conduit
and some 5-foot polypropylene trellis netting

Not everything we plant in our gardens grows up close the ground. Plants like peas, beans, cucumbers and some squash are great climbers. Their advantage is that they let us expand small gardens upward instead of having to spread outward, but the trade-off is that we'll have to provide support for the climbers. A trellis on the side or end of a garden bed is just the ticket for climbers, and dirt-simple to build.

A wooden trellises is heavy and making one requires time and patience, but the widely-available trellis netting is easy to mount, surprisingly strong, and will last for years. If that sounds good to you, head for the local hardware and buy the parts for a frame to support it. Our instructions will make a frame five feet by five feet.

Materials for a Trellis

Garden Quilt Row Cover to Extend the Season

Garden Quilts, Row Covers, and Hoops for March and April Garden Madness – and protecting the Eager Gardener’s early plantings. 

Many considered planting a vegetable garden in November unwise, although in most years this might not have been so foolish. Houston winters are typically mild and offer growing opportunities otherwise impossible – lettuce, cilantro, cole crops, dill, spinach, Swiss chard and beets grow best in the cooler season. They don’t grow in our humid summer heat. These vegetables mature as the days get shorter and cooler – but October plantings are recommended over November plantings. 


Knowing the risks associated with the late-fall planting and potential for a winter freeze (I hadn’t seen one for several years) I purchased some super hoops and a garden quilt (frost blanket) from Gardeners Supply Company. I placed the hoops outside in the square-foot gardens for the “just-in-case” moment.  Unfortunately those moments were far more frequent in the 2013-2014 winter than expected.  Fortunately, because of my efforts with the Garden Quilt and hoops, in March I’m still harvesting from the November planting. 

Super Hoops Set of Six Square Foot Gardens

Shelter Your Vegetable Garden under Supportive Super Hoops

Winter in Houston was tough on the vegetable garden this year – usually lettuce, spinach, cilantro and other salad-type vegetables produce at a time when the rest of the country stares out on cold, snow-covered landscapes. This year we endured far too many hard freezes with an average high frequently below the average low. Last October I picked up a package of Super Hoops to provide support for garden row covers and insulated garden quilts. I was quick to admit that my effort of planting the garden in early November was a gamble and was prepared for both failure or success. It was an educational experiment that succeeded.

Last night, in mid-March, I nibbled lettuce fresh from the garden and harvested cilantro for a beef-cilantro meal.  I’ve nothing but gratitude for these hoops and look forward to using them to protect seedlings from hungry birds this spring.

Small Ladders

It was surprising when the hoops arrived. They resembled short ladders rather than hoops.

Orbit Sunmate High-Rise Sprinkler

Got Tall Plants? Get a Tall Sprinkler

The Problem

At our Illinois house, the soils of the Great Corn Desert were so darned fertile people claimed that a railroad spike stuck in the ground would grow into an ironwood tree. Well, not that fertile, but just about everything we did plant got big - fast. As those plants grew, we had to keep raising the sprinkler so the closest plants didn't block the water from reaching the rest. For a while, we jury-rigged an impact sprinkler whose base rested on the bottom of a 5-gallon bucket, held in place by some rocks.

The Solution

"There must be a better way," we thought, and we were right: it's the Orbit SunMate High-Rise Sprinkler. It's a regular three-arm spinner sprinkler on a telescoping pole that extends to three feet tall. That's high enough to reach over most nearby plants and water the whole garden.

The Germination Station

The Germination Station: How to Get a Jump-start on Spring

It may be surprising, but I often start seeds for my garden in late December. No, I don't live in South America, I'm in Houston. In the steam bath we call zone 9A, the guidelines I learned as a kid - plant on Mother's Day, harvest in July - don't work. That's because tomatoes don't set fruit if  the temperature stays in the 90s all night: chiles, maybe; tomatoes, no. That lets us plant a fall garden, setting out seedlings in August and harvesting while our friends in the Midwest are raking leaves. That is, if the squirrels don't get to everything first...

The first time I tried this was in Illinois, except that then I started seeds in February in the depths of Midwestern winter.  The references told me I needed to heat the soil to start seeds that early, so I picked up a Hydrofarm Germination Station.

Free-Standing Garden Hose Hanger with Faucet

Water Whenever and Wherever You Need it, Without a Plumber

When I owned an old house - a really old house - I had many a chance to wish a curse on some of the house's Previous Owners. PO is a sort of a curse word among those whose houses were built before the War (as for the great, formerly white elephant on the edge of the prairie, that would be the Spanish-American War). What did the do this time? Well, there was a hose bib at the back of the house, but the PO built a deck there, with the hose bib still in place under the floor. you could just barely reach it though a basement window without dislocating a shoulder, but it was  the only place to can attach a hose that would reach the garden! Hmmmm: a quandary.

Wall o' Water

Protecting Bedding Plants from Late Frosts

Every gardener goes through the same syndrome every spring. You know what I mean: your tomato seedlings have outgrown their little peat pots and have gotten leggy, too tall for your grow lights. Worse, they're starting to look a tad peaked. Still, the climate refuses to cooperate: even though average last frost was a week ago, the weatherman's talking about high twenties in the nights ahead. Even here in the deep south, I've been able to find a couple of sun-faded, battered carton exactly what we used during Denver's unpredictable springs; we gardener’s savior called a Wall o’ Water.

What’s a Wall o' Water?

It’s a flexible circle composed of plastic tubes two inches in diameter with open tops and closed bottom. It makes a circle 18" across and 18" high, all heavy-weight green plastic. When you fill those tubes with water, the whole thing stands upright. "So what?" you say. Well, the important thing is important is what’s inside: a tender little bedding plant. The plastic wall protects your babies from chilly winds, and the water holds latent heat overnight. That prevents whatever’s inside from exposure to late-season freezes. The company claims that one will protect a plant to 16°F (-8°C), though they don't say for how long. On the other hand, I’ve never seen one frozen solid, or seen a bedding plant killed by frost when surrounded by one. I have seen plants get fried if you leave one in place once the danger of frost has passed.

A Wall o’ Water operates on simple physics: water is more efficient at holding heat than air, so the device forms a sort of tiny “heat island” around whatever is inside. You fill the tubes part way at first so the top leans inward, teepee-like, for added protection. When it gets warmer you fill them all the way so the thing stands up straight in a cylinder. The trick is to fill them in stages, so the plant has the most protection when it’s smallest, then the top is open to let in sunlight and warmth as the plant grows. With a Wall o' Water, you can put out bedding plants as much as a month in advance without needing a cold frame.

Once the danger of frost is over, I’ll squeeze the tubes to empty out enough water that I can lift it off the plant, and then pour out the rest of the water. We make a point of letting them dry thoroughly before putting them in storage.  If treated properly, they will last almost indefinitely.

Summary:

PLUS: plants can go in the ground even if there's still danger of frost
MINUS: you can fry a plant if you leave them on into the hot season
WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: A Wall o' Water gives bedding plants get a head start, "average last frost date" be damned!

copyright © 2014-2017 scmrak

Dalen Gardeneer Trellis Netting

Plants Grow Up, Not Out

Our current patch of ground in the burbs ca

Pole beans covering a 5' x 5'
section of trellis netting.

me with a yard the size of a postage-stamp; tough enough on two large dogs, but worse for dedicated gardeners. We barely shoehorned in a garden space using the Square Foot Garden method, but hey what are you going to do when the closest farmer's market is forty minute's drive away? Our attempt is meeting with moderate success, although the horrendous heat waves and droughts of the past few years may have influenced that.

One thing we learned from our labors was how to make a homemade trellis from a frame of EMT conduit set on rebar pegs. Instead of a a wood or metal mesh, our reference said to use trellis netting… what? Never heard of it… until we found it at a nearby garden supply shop. We've since seen it even at our local BigBox hardwares.